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Posts tagged “Bob Livingston”

Sibel Edmonds has a story to tell. She went to work as a Turkish and Farsi translator for the FBI five days after 9/11. Part of her job was to translate and transcribe recordings of conversations between suspected Turkish intelligence agents and their American contacts. She was fired from the FBI in April 2002 after she raised concerns that one of the translators in her section was a member of a Turkish organization that was under investigation for bribing senior government officials and members of Congress, drug trafficking, illegal weapons sales, money laundering, and nuclear proliferation. She appealed her termination, but was more alarmed that no effort was being made to address the corruption that she had been monitoring.Sibel Edmonds and Philip GiraldiThe American Conservative

[Edit: 6:3410:21 PM CDT] Sibel posted her response to Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s attack on her character. Pretty good, in my opinion. I’ve integrated some of Sibel’s links into this post and details to the names on the list of members of Congress.

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Sibel (pronounced suh-bell) took her case all the way to the United States Supreme Court, who refused to hear the case. At each turn, she and her ACLU attorneys were barred from the courtroom while Justice Department officials discussed the matter with the judge(s) and decided her fate thanks to the “State Secrets Privilege“, a draconian executive order that is the extra-judicial legal equivalent of “no, because I said so.”

There was almost no mainstream media coverage in the United States (one 60 Minutes segment and a Vanity Fair article) and that was the way it was for Sibel Edmonds…until August 8, 2009. Finally, after years of having her right to free speech surreptitiously squashed, the Obama administration opted not to invoke the state secrets privilege and she was allowed to speak under oath in a deposition in Ohio (entire deposition video after jump).

Sibel has been trying to tell her story to the authorities and the media since 2001 and now that the gag has come off, she is telling it from the mountain top. Who can blame her? The American Conservative (Pat Buchanan’s magazine) ran an interview that she did with former CIA operative Philip Giraldi on their cover on Tuesday. Sibel finally named names.Read the rest of this entry »